Telephone conferencing is widely used in business to enable groups of diversely disciplined individuals to have meaningful interactive discussions, which provide understanding of inter-related issues and thereby achieve progress on complex projects without the expense, time and inconvenience of travel. Most teleconferencing systems developed to date have used audio mixing techniques which are hardware based and thereby do not provide the greater sophistication available with software based systems. Such hardware based systems typically mix all incoming audio signals which can at times provide listeners with a confusing cacophony. Signal levels between the various conference connections can be normalized to compensate for audio volume variations between participants; however, significant sophistication for controlling the contents of the resulting audio output can still be lacking. Managing teleconferences using such technology is still very dependent upon the etiquette observed by the participants. Such hardware based mixing systems are also typically costly to install and maintain, making them useable only by telephone service providers and available to business users only as a subscription service.
It is desirable in teleconferencing systems to have greater sophistication in various aspects of each teleconference and particularly in the audio mixing aspect. An important part of such systems is the audio gain function for normalizing volume levels from diverse participating connections. It is also desirable to have a software based teleconferencing system which is more affordable to business users.